Well, I haven't written in a long time..My last entry talks
about AP Computer Science (APCS) final project. Well asusual
we didn't quite finish it. We worked on it seriously the day
before it wasdue and decided that we were out of time and
dropped the SDL frontend. We had it working where 8 people
could connect and move snakes around and decided to stop
there. It was late and we were sleep deprived so we decided
not to implement game functionality. I also had the AP test
for Comp Sci, it was quite easy..I just got the results back
recently and I got a 5 (the highest grade) =)

Life
So school is out now..Having quite a boring summer as usual.
I have a job working at Euclid Computers, I'm
writing Perl stuff for them like graphing orders/clicks and
fun stuff like that ... My grandfather passed away
yesterday.. I didn't know him too well; he came to the US
when I was 5 and lived with us for a short while until he
started living alone and his health was continously
degrading. Last I saw him, he was a complete vegetable ..

Well, I finally got through the Debian NM process and I'm a
Debian developer now. Yay..

I visited Europe a few weeks ago. We took a plane to Paris
and immediately rented a car and took off to Waterloo,
Belgium. We stayed there a night and visited nearby
Brussels. We then went to Brugge, Belgium and stayed there a
couple of nights. Afterwards, we stayed in Delft,
Netherlands for a night and then we stayed in Amsterdam for
three nights. Then we travelled to Koln, Germany and stayed
a night there. After that, we went to Frankfurt and stayed
there two nights. We then went to Munich and rested a night
there. Then we stopped in Bazel, Switzerland for a night.
Afterwards, we drove to an airport (forgot which) by Paris
and stayed in a hotel there for a night and then we flew
back to San Jose, CA. It was a pretty cool vacation..

GtkHx
GtkHx is now up to version 0.8.13 and a kind person has
redesigned the GtkHx
website. I haven't worked on it recently but I've got
some cool ideas for it. Just need to overcome my
unwillingness to work..

Hardware
My workstation recently started randomly locking up in X. I
thought that my GeForce II MX finally decided to start dying
on me so I bought a Radeon VE to replace it but it didn't
fix the problem. When I was upgrading packages, my machine
just restarted and it would restart everytime I ran apt-get
dist-upgrade, each time damaging files. Someone on
#debian-devel pointed out that the files might be damaged
because I was using ReiserFS with kernel 2.4.4. Sure enough,
that was the problem. I upgraded my kernel by sticking the
drive into the server and building it there and then
installing it on my machine. But X still locked up randomly
with either card. I thought that perhaps my RAM was bad
again (I've had experience where my RAM decided to stop
functioning.) I bought replacement RAM, but it didn't solve
the problem. So then, I thought it must either be my
motherboard or CPU. Now my workstation has a Slot A AMD
Athlon. Fry's no longer carries any Slot A boards/CPUs, so I
had to get myself a completely new motherboard and CPU (1GHz
AMD Thunderbird =) ) and now everything works well.

I also recently upgraded my server's 400MHz PII to a 550MHz
PIII. The motherboard in the server was built before PIIIs
even existed, but it seems to work fine.

Some more work done on our AP Comp Sci final project.
aaronl and I have split up the jobs so that
he does server game logic (the game is handled on the
server-side, of course), AI client, and portability issues,
while I will do socket and I/O multiplexing stuff, curses
client, and SDL client. I've started exploring SDL today and
I find it extremely cool especially since it supports MacOS,
Win32, and BeOS in addition to Linux. We have a basic
server that handles all connections and a working event loop
for it and curses/SDL clients with working event loops but
we haven't really started on actual gameplay but this is
pretty good progress.

I haven't posted anything here for quite a while. GtkHx
development is progressing very well and I'll probably
release GtkHx 0.8.10 sometime soon...aaronl
and I are still working on the WordTris game and have made
great progress but it is not quite ready for release
yet...Currently we're working on a multiplayer networked
snake game for AP Computer Science final project. I just
took
the exam for AP Computer Science recently and found it
extremely easy; I just hope my score will be good...Life's
been really turbulent and messy lately, but I don't have
much to say about it here. At the moment, my server is down
because Pacific Bell sucks, although they haven't given me
trouble for like a year now.

Haven't posted a diary entry in a while...I'm working on a
WordTris game with aaronl right
now. I finally made a release of Tiger and I am
discussing future cooperation with the author of TiLP
(formerly GtkTiLink) and GtkTiEmu. I've also done some work
on GtkHx and adding support for some stuff that Hotline 1.5+
servers support, such as threaded news. I added IPv6
support to hx/hxd, but I still need to make the tracker work
with it as it stores server address in 4 bytes -- for IPv6
it will have to be 16 bytes. I still have to add IPv6
support to GtkHx <-- it isbeing a bit weird...Currently, I
am reorganizing the code. Life is pretty good now.

So I got my cat back (read previous entry for information)
and I'm very glad. He's changed quite a bit in the couple
of months he has been missing. He's a bit more fat (someone
seems to have fed him quite well) and his fur grew longer.
Also, he is not as afraid of strangers now (I guess he
learned not to be as he has to depend on strangers to help
him.) I'm quite relieved that I got him back.

I haven't posted a diary entry in a while. Life has been
very busy. I got an IBM ThinkPad 570E for...New Year's I
guess since I don't celebrate Christmas or Hannukah or any
such religious holiday. I got it for a few reasons -- my
organization problem mostly. I hate paper and I can't
organize paper. I can now take notes in emacs heh. Second,
after school I can accomplish a lot of programming work but
I can't do it using a lame Java SSH client on Windoze and my
school has a nice wireless network. Third, I need a laptop
next year anyway =P Anyway, I put up a screenshot of my
laptop in action here.
I just had finals last week -- I did okay on all of them
except for Chemistry, which I totally bombed on. Chemistry
doesn't make much sense to me, at this point in time.

Yesterday, I was contacted regarding my cat.
Apparently,
someone found him 10 days ago and just gained his trust a
couple of days ago and they found the report I filed a
couple of months ago and brought him to the shelter and
contacted me. He has been wandering around the same area he
ran away for a couple of months now -- the person who
brought in my cat said that he asked neighbors about the cat
first and they said they have been aware of it wandering
around for a while now. The description of the cat fits
that of my cat's perfectly, it appeared in that area around
the same time mine got lost, and they found him in an area
right by the apartment complex he ran away from, so I am
pretty sure that this is my cat. I will go to the animal
shelter as soon as I get out of school to check if it is
really my cat, and if it is, I will take him home.

I have done a lot of work on GtkHx recently. I put all
functions using blocking connect() into other threads so
that they wouldn't lock up my main thread while trying to
connect. I am also working on implementing the new threaded
news protocol. I've made quite a few other change too. I
predict that I will be able to make a full 1.0 release in a
2-3 months, if all goes well and I fight my laziness.

Recently, I wanted to package hxd/hx/ghx for Debian. So, as
I was writing the package information, I came across the
copyright file. I pondered for a minute thinking what the
copyright line should be and what license hxd has. To my
surprise there was none.

On further investigation, I found a bunch of stuff in
violation of the GNU General
Public License. For example hx 0.7.x had a COPYING file
but it was questionable. It mentioned GPL version 69 [ or
earlier ]. Obviously, Ryan Nielsen's idea of a joke. hxd
0.1.33 does not contain any COPYING file at all. It does
however, contain GPL'd code from GNU Readline and
strptime.

Even if hxd did not violate the GPL, it still could not be
put into Debian as it has no license. Certain rights,
required by the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidlines), are
not implied unless specifically stated. For example, the
right to distribute modified source is not implied.

aaronl and I confronted Ryan
Nielsen, the author of hxd,
and asked him what was up with this. He basically said that
licenses suck and expressed his unwillingness to correct
this potentially serious problem. He also inquired aaronl
whether he had sex with an elephant woman during this
conversation.

I just found out on Wednesday that my cat ran away from my
grandma's apartment three weeks ago. I am extremely
depressed and at the same time extremely pissed off.
Anyway, we sent my cat to my grandma's for a vacation and it
turns out one day he just got access to the balcony, jumped
on a tree, and ran off. And then my mom and grandmother
tried to play hero and made a few HANDWRITTEN, and I repeat
HANDWRITTEN, "posters" and hung them up at the retirement
home. Anyway, I made a good "Lost Cat" poster and put it
into mass production, I made 30 copies of it. I posted 27
copies on various streets he might have run off to and made
sure that the posters were where people could see them
well. I checked the two animal shelters where he could be
but did not get very positive results. The nearest one,
which is the one he most likely could have been to, reports
that they keep cats for 7 days and then put them up for
adoption. We did not find my cat and looked through many
reports. We did not find any report of a cat fitting his
description in the area where he ran off -- he does not like
cars/noise/people he does not know, so he could not run very
far! The next animal shelter was the Santa Clara Humane
Society, the largest shelter on the west coast. There were
quite a few cats, even cats resembling my cat -- but no
match. I can now only hope that some family took him in,
like I did to another cat and see my posters. I took in a
cat a long time ago. He was fearless. He just ran into our
house when the door was open, and my grandmother, she lived
at our house, fed him and he stayed. One day he didn't come
back and I heard reports of a run over cat...Anyway, my
ranting on here won't help the situation...

I accomplished a lot the day after I found out he was
missing. I (mostly) fixed file xfers. There's only one bug
that I know of, and it's pretty minor. I released GtkHx
0.8.4 and since then I have not coded much...

I haven't written in a while. I just released GtkHx 0.8.3
and earlier this morning I moved GtkHx to sourceforge.net
since LinuxAve announced they were shutting down on Jan 1,
2001. Life has been pretty good, school exhausting. I have
a screenshot of the most recent GtkHx available at http://gtkhx.sourceforge.net/gtkhx.jpg

I helped a friend setup a home network yesterday. I
installed Debian on one of his spare computers and setup ip
masquerading. Much easier than the time I setup mine as
this time I knew exactly what to do/how to do it. I'm still
working on GtkHx actively -- I want to fix a few major bugs
and work on file transfers before I release 0.8.2, it is
looking good.